Most teaching assistants, graduate students, and even professors often proclaim that the worst part about teaching is the grading. It's hard to describe to someone who has never graded before what is so difficult about this task, and how, for inexplicable reasons, it simply drives people crazy. But why? Why is it that grading, unlike studying, class-prepping, lecturing, or other administrative duties, seems to be on a completely different level?...
In a sense, it's unfortunate that this is the case, as grading, or, the production of feedback, is at the core of the study-practice-feedback model of learning that we employ in our classrooms. A bad job of grading produces a learning structure that is missing a crucial step in the learning of a student. The university even measures this as "TA hours per student per course'', and quantifies how important the time you spend interfacing with students can be.
So why is grading hard? Because it is not rewarding. The grader spends their entire time desciphering a student's answer, toiling, and frustrating to decrypt the student's often-jumbled thoughts. The grader often finds themselves wondering "what the heck was this student thinking when they wrote this?'', and, as humans tend to do when they misunderstand each other, the grader may express directed anger at the student. The grader justifies the anger by saying that the student is wasting their time, or that the student just vomited up gibberish to scrape by some marks, and that this is an unadmirable behaviour by the student. Add to this the fact that students cannot clarify their answers, explain what they are doing in words, and are a faceless piece of paper, and the feeling is amplified.
Yet the grader has a job, and grits their teeth as they dig deeper and deeper into the students' brain, a quite uncomfortable place to be, someone else's brain, that is. Eventually, all becomes clear, the grader understands enough about the student's response to assign it a numerical value, writes down the number of points that the student is worth, and moves on to the next puzzle. At the end of the day, for all of the frustration, furrowed brows, and work of the grader, all that resulted was a number. Neither the student, nor the grader after ten minutes, will ever know what the number signifies, and how it got there. The solution to the puzzle that was the student is lost due to poor documentation.
This is not rewarding. Neither to the grader, who cannot see the value of their work, nor to the student, who gets no dignity or concern over their work.
There is a two-pronged solution to this problem. The perspective of the grader should shift from an assessive role, to more of a formative role. The university allocates interaction hours with the expectation that they will be used for interaction. Grading is a form of interaction. The students are to be respected. Personally, when I grade, and when I notice myself on the boundary of anger, I remember that for some of the quieter students in the course, this evaluation is the only time they will get with an expert. My students deserve my attention and they deserve a fair and critical evaluation.
The second prong of the solution is to leave behind good feedback. This not only validates the student's efforts, but also provides a concrete actualization of the changed perspective of the grader, as described above. Moreover, this also allows for easier re-assessment, and makes the students understand their evaluation, giving us the end-result of happier, better-learned students who are equipped to face the next steps in the course.
Providing good feedback is a skill of its own, but the general guideline I suggest is to focus on one thing that the student should do differently next time. Even gibberish can be responded to with an actionable request: "write clearer'', "make sure what you write can be read aloud in a sentence", "make sure that you understand the symbols you are using''. It is important to note that in giving feedback, it is not just useful to show why the student was wrong, but also to explain how they can improve. You are not here to just diagnose, but also to prescribe treatment.
Grading is hard. Even with strategies, grading is hard. But for the sake of yourself, and for the sake of all of your students, don't let your work be spent in vain.
Update: Some bits of evidence to support whatever grading hypothesis you might hold